This out of touch. The Verge’s Josh Topolsky asks a pretty reasonable question to a big mover/shaker in the film industry, and gets back an “ad hominem” style bashing. Watch the video. Know your enemy.
Topolsky reflects on the exchange:
What Ari seems to forget, and what maybe politicians and the film and TV industry seem to forget is the last time piracy was a flashpoint between the entertainment and tech industries, the problem was not solved by sledgehammer legislation. Or takedowns. Or yelling. It was solved by the music industry accepting that their old model was broken, and technologists figuring out a new way to do business. And that gets to the core of this problem for Ari. We didn’t go back to the way things were after the RIAA sued college students — the industry changed.
He doesn’t want to change his business model, and he will do anything he can to protect it — including altering the basic functionality of the internet. Pirating and Apple’s resulting rise in the music business changed that business forever… and diminished its financial footprint. Entrenched companies that owned every part of the food chain suddenly discovered they were just another cog in a big wheel.
The point isn’t that piracy isn’t a problem, but that the movie/TV industry’s solution is so out of step with reality. Instead of doing like the music industry and offering compelling, reasonably priced alternatives (without ads and warnings and un-skippable content that makes the pirated version actually better than the real thing because it doesn’t include that junk), they want to alter in a basic sense the way the Internet works. These guys were behind SOPA, ACTA, and whatever else is on the horizon as far as internet censorship bills go.